Image: The Raising of Lazarus (1461) by Nicholas Froment. The right panel shows Mary anointing Jesus's feet.
We find ourselves this week on the eve of Jesus’s entrance into Jerusalem. Soon enough, we’ll follow Jesus into the holy city. We’ll watch the religious and secular leaders plot his death, seeking to kill his movement in the crib. We’ll follow all the way to a cross outside the city walls, where he will be put to death under the charge “The King of the Jews”. But for now, let’s stop a while and rest in Lazarus’s home.
In the previous chapter, Jesus raised Lazarus after he had been dead for four days, demonstrating his mastery over life and death. Now, Jesus returns to Bethany after living on the edge of civilization for a time and shares a meal with friends before facing death himself.
But something shocking happens at this meal. Mary, one of Lazarus’s sisters, takes a Roman pound—about twelve ounces—of a perfume of pure nard. Spikenard oil comes from a flower that grows only in the Himalayas. It’s a labor-intensive process to harvest the flower’s underground stems and extract the aromatic oil. Transport would have taken months or even years to get to Palestine over the Silk Road, which would have had dangers like bandits or unpredictable weather. The cost? Three hundred denarii—or nearly a year’s salary for a common laborer.
Little wonder Judas objects. John tells us he objects because he wanted to profit from the ointment’s sale. But there is something else going on here. This story can be read as a strange retelling of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Judas is in the part of the elder brother here, sitting in judgment over Mary because of her apparent wastefulness. She has taken an obscenely expensive perfume and used it all on Jesus’s feet. It literally overflows; its fragrance fills the house. There is so much, she has to wipe it up with her hair. And leaving aside Judas’s motivation, he does have a point. After all, Jesus consistently aligns himself with the underside of society. His quote, “You will always have the poor with you,” is directly from Deuteronomy, which commands the people of Israel to care for the poor and disadvantaged among them. But it’s possible to be right in a completely wrong way. Judas can’t see that compared with the perfume, Jesus is a far greater treasure—one that the disciples will not always have with them. As he judges Mary, Judas is simply resistant to the new thing that God is doing in Jesus Christ.
And we see such judgment everywhere throughout the history of God’s people. Many of the exiles of Babylon, who had grown overly comfortable with their surroundings, had difficulty seeing the new thing God was doing by calling them back to Jerusalem. Paul, for his part, utterly rejected the new thing God was doing in Jesus Christ until he was knocked flat on the road to Damascus. In the fifth century, Augustine thought the Bible was a group of silly stories, much greatly to the great works of classical literature, until God opened his eyes, mind, and heart to receive Jesus Christ. Martin Luther’s rediscovery of the centrality of grace was roundly rejected by the religious authorities of his time until the ecumenical age of the late 20th century. And we see such judgment today—judgment over who is welcome in the church. Judgment over who the church ought to help. Judgment on those who pour out their lives to live out God’s grace, love, and welcome for all.
Because we know what happens after this dinner. Jesus will be arrested by some of the people he came to liberate and redeem. He will be condemned as a revolutionary. And he will suffer and die outside the city. “What a waste!” we could imagine folks saying. “He could have had it all! He had the power of God to command! Yet when arrested, tried, and condemned, he doesn’t bother to save himself!” The story is incomprehensible to those who expect God to wreak violence and condemnation in liberating God’s people. But that is the new thing God does in Jesus Christ. In Jesus, God pours himself out completely, just as Mary completely poured out the ointment over his feet. In Jesus, God is lifted up on a cross by human beings who prefer their own ways of violence and death to God’s way of shalom and life. Yet when Jesus is on that cross, something amazing happens. In that horrific image of torture and death at the hands of church and state, we see God’s love fully revealed. We see God who refuses to use the empire’s weapons of death and coercion, who instead draws all people to himself by absorbing the worst the world had to throw at him. We see God liberating others by dying himself. We see God enthroned as Lord and King on an instrument of torture and death. In Jesus, God neutralizes the sting of death forever and those who would wield it as a weapon of control.
So, of course we can be resistant to that because it doesn’t depend on us at all! It takes away our own means of control over our own destiny, much like Judas was resistant to not getting control over the three hundred denarii that the ointment would have fetched. Yet, thank God God’s work continues despite our resistance; despite our own feeble attempts to re-assert control over not just ourselves, but over others as well. Instead, we might do well to emulate the three siblings of this story: Lazarus, Martha, and Mary. All of them act in gratitude by giving Jesus this dinner. Martha serves, as Martha is wont to do! And Mary totally pours out the ointment over Jesus’s feet, which foreshadows Jesus pouring out himself for the life of the world. So, as we continue in Lent, let’s hear God’s invitation to let go of our resistance to God’s work in us and in others. Let go of our desire to control. And step into powerful lives fueled by gratitude and service to God’s people, aware of the new thing God has done and is doing in Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God. Amen.
© 2025, David M. Fleener. Permission granted to copy and adapt original material herein for non-commercial purposes with appropriate credit given.